How does social media and your smart phone impact your mental health? Problematic smartphone and social media use with Dr. Jon Elhai

In this conversation, Dan welcomes Dr. Jon Elhai to discuss problematic smart phone and social media use.

This conversation explores the addictive aspects of social media and smart phones; however, they are not recognized as addictive disorders in the DSM or ICD. They also discuss the risk factors for excessive internet use, such as long-standing issues, coping styles, and internet-related cognitive biases like fear of missing out (FOMO). They discuss the importance of assessing the functional impairments caused by excessive use rather than just the duration of use. They explore the relationship between rumination, excessive reassurance seeking, and problematic use, and the potential negative mood effects of smartphone and social media use. In this conversation, Jon and Dan discuss the relationship between smartphone use and mental health, particularly depression. They highlight that excessive smartphone use is more likely to exacerbate existing mental health issues rather than cause them. They argue that social media and smartphones can have both positive and negative effects, depending on the individual and their circumstances. They also discuss the role of clinicians in assessing and treating problematic smartphone use, as well as the importance of parental guidance and government regulations to protect children from the potential harms of excessive digital media use.

Guest Starring:

Dr. Jon Elhai

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Transcript

Broadcasting from the most beautiful city in the world, I'm your host, Dr. Dan Cox, a professor in counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to episode number four of Psychotherapy & Applied Psychology. Here we dive deep with the world's leading researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and have some fun along the way.
Before we get started, I'd like to ask a small favor. If you enjoy the show, please share it with just one person who might find it interesting. You can easily hit the share button on your phone right now and send it via text, post it on social media, or however you prefer.
Your support in spreading the word would mean the world to me. On today's show, I absolutely could not be more excited to have this conversation with my excellent guest who's a leader in the area of problematic smartphone and social media use. In our conversation, we discussed fear of missing out, AKA FOMO, avoidance, depression, gender differences, parenting, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, assessment, treatment, the role of government, and much more.
While many of you listening will know this, let me do a quick jargon clarification for, at the very least, my mom and dad. Hi, mom and dad. In our conversation, we bring up the DSM and the ICD.
DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and ICD is the International Classification of Disease. You can just think of the DSM and ICD as guidebooks for diagnosing mental health disorders. I should also note that this was take two of our conversation.
After recording for a while, I realized that I was in fact not recording. I still feel terrible about this, but fortunately, my guest graciously rolled with my ineptitude, which I'm very appreciative of. Without further ado, I'm thrilled to have one of the world's foremost experts in problematic smartphone and social media use, a distinguished professor in the University of Toledo's Department of Psychology, Dr. Jon Elhai.
We're recording, and I'm totally even, in the actual final cut of this, I'm going to own. So I'm gonna sort of peek behind the curtain here so that Jon and I recorded for about 15 or 20 minutes before I realized that I had not clicked on the record button. So we're gonna do take two, and we're not just gonna try to remake the conversation.
We're gonna have an actual real conversation. So to get started, Jon, why don't you tell us and me again, but sort of your origin story in terms of how you got into problematic smartphone use and social media use from what you were doing before, which was you were a heavy hitter in the area of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yeah, so throughout graduate school in the mid to late 90s, I was studying trauma and PTSD as my research, my thesis dissertation, that sort of thing. And my post-doc first faculty job at the University of South Dakota, that was my research area of trauma and PTSD. But since I had done that from about 1995, when I started graduate school until about 2014, 2015, was when I started getting a little bit restless, which actually interestingly coincided with me becoming a full professor in 2014.
So whether it's full professor or tenure, sometimes it's like not exactly a coincidence that folks start getting a little restless. And so I started, I kind of could sense that I was getting a little bit burnt out on doing PTSD and trauma research for so long. Certainly other PTSD experts in the field who I've collaborated with have spent way more than 20 years studying PTSD, and kudos to them.
But I just started having other ideas that I wanted to pursue, which in my case, were about digital technology use, because I've always been a technology hobbyist. I would always be the first one to get a new type of technology. I remember having the ring doorbell when it was called the door bot when it first came out, maybe close to 10 years ago, and people were wondering, what is this thing you have on your door?
We've never even heard of such a thing. And so, yeah, so for those reasons, I ended up having these ideas to study different aspects of cyber psychology, how computer technology influences us. And the more that I started getting into this sort of research program of cyber psychology and internet addictions, as each year that went by of me studying these topics, I had become less and less interested in continuing trauma and PTSD.
So now I am basically hardly involved with PTSD or trauma research.
So since you had about two decades of trauma and PTSD research, what is your one, the one thing that you sort of, your biggest takeaway, the thing you learned sort of about trauma or PTSD, then we'll just take a side road here for a moment, in two decades of doing work that you would, you know, what's the most interesting thing or the most controversial thing or you walked away with or experience you had?
Well, my biggest interest over the years in studying PTSD was looking at the conceptualizations that we use to examine the symptom structure of PTSD. So looking at the factor structure using structural equation modeling and things like that. And so when I was, you know, early in my career when I was studying PTSD studies, we, you know, in the DSM-IV, we had this three symptom cluster conceptualization of PTSD.
And now in DSM-V, we have four factors because the emotional numbing and the effortful avoidance were split into separate clusters, primarily because of research that folks had done on the factor analysis of PTSD. So that was always interesting to me to look at other types of models of how we splice together symptoms in order to kind of optimally find the best fitting structure.
So do you think that the DSM-V way is a good way to do it, or what would you, you know, if you were writing the DSM-VI, how would you do it?
So I like the split of the avoidance and numbing clusters, but what I don't like about the DSM-V PTSD is that there's still even, there's even more emphasis on the PTSD diagnosis with regard to kind of general dysphoria types of symptoms. And so I feel like, why not just take that out? We've got other disorders that are relevant.
You know, you could have someone who's diagnosed with PTSD and major depressive disorder or dysthymic disorder, persistent depressive disorder. So instead, if, you know, you've got this issue where if you have a, you can meet criteria for PTSD and you've got all this dysphoric content, and so it ends up being such a diverse diagnosis, where I think we could probably achieve some more parsimony by splicing things out some more.
Yeah, so just to, for the listener, the way that I'm thinking about what you're saying is that in DSM-5, there's more of this sort of affective, kind of, and it sort of sounds like depression kind of symptoms in the disorder, in the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that perhaps it would be better to separate that out a little bit more, and then of course, if folks have PTSD and they're experiencing depressive episodes, then, you know, it would be absolutely appropriate to diagnose them with both, but by sort of pushing all this extra stuff into the PTSD diagnosis, it sort of makes the PTSD diagnosis more heterogeneous in terms of what it looks like.
And diffuse, and kind of sometimes I wonder, is this what the original diagnosis of PTSD was intended to do many years ago when it first appeared in DSM 3?
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, since I had you here, I couldn't resist, you know, five minutes to hear from your expertise on PTSD. But back to problematic digital use.
So what is it?
Yeah, so, you know, it's similar to, you know, I use this term, many experts use this term, terms like problematic internet use, excessive internet use, internet overuse, that sort of thing. These are kind of buzzwords for addiction. And I'll define how we measure this and I'll say how we define it.
But we're generally careful, not most experts in these fields. We don't usually refer to these as addictive disorders. There's no, for example, problematic smartphone or internet use disorder in DSM or in ICD.
In ICD, there is a gaming disorder, which is an actual diagnosis now. And in DSM-5, there's no actual diagnosis, but there is a gaming disorder diagnosis that is to be studied for future research. So it's not an actual current disorder, but it is one for future experiments.
So I'm particularly careful not to refer to it, to these things as addictive disorders. Also, we don't only have adequate scientific evidence that something like problematic smartphone use, problematic social media is, although they are psychological constructs, they can be disturbing to people. It doesn't seem like there's adequate scientific evidence that they're truly addictive, like other addictive disorders that are actually codified in ICD or DSM, of those being truly addictive.
But nonetheless, we do measure them similarly to other addictive disorders. So we look to, oftentimes in terms of measurement and assessment, we look to things like problematic smartphone use. We ask questions like we would ask with these other addictive disorders to see if in the absence of the smartphone, does the person develop withdrawal symptoms?
Can they develop tolerance to the use of the device or its features? Can they get in trouble in some way socially or from their work or even legally? I mean, if you're using your smartphone too much on the road while you're driving, there are laws in most, if not all states in the US where I am preventing you from doing that.
So that's kind of a legal consequence like we see in the symptom criteria for other addictive disorders. So we measure these things in a similar way.
So you said that it's not an addictive disorder. So I guess what would it either, you know, what, why is it not? I'm part of what I heard you say is we just don't have enough research to support that.
So that makes a lot of sense. But other than that, what do you see it as really differentiating problematic smartphone and social media use from addiction?
Yeah, well, I think that I don't think that, I personally think, and I've written about this recently, that maybe some of these constructs should be classified as disorders. And we argued in a paper a few years ago, there is a gaming disorder. And why is it that you could be diagnosed with gaming disorder in ICD, but if you have the same sort of problem and excessive use, but of a different type of technology, like social media or the internet or smartphone, then you can't be diagnosed with that.
So I wouldn't be surprised if in the future, we do have other ways of diagnosing this. It's just that currently at the present time, gaming disorder is the only one that's recognized as an addictive disorder that is a disorder in the DSM-5. I'm sorry, to be researched in the DSM-5, it is a disorder in ICD.
But the case that we've made is, well, if you're gaming and you're gaming for many hours a day and it's causing you social consequences, you're not seeing friends, you're just in your home. But if you're doing that same thing with a smartphone or social media, I mean, is that really much different? I don't think it really is.
But at the present time, because of the restrictions that we have, that's why we wouldn't call something like problematic smartphone use addictive.
So do you have, I was sort of thinking as you were talking and sort of as preparing for this, that you all have developed specific tools for assessing problematic smartphone and social media use, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's not a tool that I've developed in particular, but yeah, there are self-reports and also we can talk about objective methods for assessing problematic smartphone use.
Oh, yeah, let's go there.
So it certainly wouldn't hurt when, if you're, whether for research purposes or clinically, to inquire about how much someone is using their phone, regardless of the consequences. That's the distinction. So just to mention this real briefly, we wouldn't just say that someone seems to score high on problematic smartphone use because they're using their smartphone for a lot of hours a day, because duration of use doesn't necessarily indicate impairment.
And so the example that I've sometimes written about in papers is think about someone who's, for example, a real estate agent, who their life, their work is very greatly helped by having a smartphone. They can talk to banks and customers, sellers, buyers. I don't really know exactly what a real estate does on a day-to-day basis, but I assume that it's greatly helped by their smartphone.
So maybe they can be on their smartphone for six hours a day and it's not harming them. And in fact, it's helping them and they still can make it home by dinnertime and spend time with their family in the evening so that they can still get socialization and things like that. Six hours a day, right?
But you take someone like a college student who's going to school, but also maybe working on the side, to spend even two hours on their phone might be detrimental to them. I mean, because you have to have time to sleep, socialize, work, go to school, exercise. So the amount of time is not the criterion, but rather how much that, to what extent, the use or overuse of the device or internet, social media causes functional impairments in everyday life.
To what extent does it cause you problems in work, socially, school, academics, if you're a student, and that sort of thing. So I guess that also, that lends to the discussion of assessment measures, if you want to talk about that next.
Yeah, so I guess before we get there, so what leads folks to get into problematic use?
Yeah, so because not everybody does, and so you or I might use our phones when we need to or want to, but it's not necessarily problematic. So really, there are risk factors for the excessive engagement in the internet like smartphone. And so there are theoretical models that have been, for example, Matthias Brand's I-Pace model that conceptualize risk factors for problematic internet use, including problematic smartphone use.
Some of the risk factors involve longstanding issues for the person, predisposing variables, genetics, chemical imbalance from long ago for the person, long-term psychopathology, things like that. So those are what in the I-Pace model, the I-Pace theoretical model, we call them the person-centered type of variables. We also have more recent proximal variables, intermediate variables, affective and cognitive mechanisms, coping styles, how you regulate emotion, internet-related cognitive biases, like fear of missing out on rewarding experiences, which is talked a lot about these days.
I conceptualize that as an internet-related cognitive bias. Disinhibition, other kinds of variables that also serve as risk factors for excessive technology use. So there are a whole host of factors, and one of the things that I like about Matthias Brand's I-PACE model is that it's like a unified model.
It's not so complex that you can't see the forest from the trees, and yet it's parsimonious enough that it's not too parsimonious and excludes a lot of variables, but it's comprehensive enough that it's a nice unified theory.
So you mentioned fear of missing out. I feel like we should, I would like to delve a little deeper into that.
Yeah, FOMO. So yeah, so FOMO has been studied academically, scientifically for about 15 years, 10, 15 years or so. Highly related statistically to engagement in social media use.
Sorry, just stop you for one second. So I feel like most folks will know, but could you say what fear of missing out is?
Yeah, so fear of missing out is typically defined as the apprehension of missing out on important stuff that's going on in your social network. I don't just mean social network like your Facebook group, but your social connections and the persistent desire to wanna stay connected with the people who you know, your friends, your family. So someone who's really high in FOMO might maybe feel really dreadful or really distressed that they somehow missed that their friends were going on a vacation without them.
So it's also kind of really related to being socially ostracized. That's kind of a similar kind of construct FOMO is.
But it would be, so FOMO is a perceived sort of ostracism, not necessarily an actual ostracism, is it right?
Right, I mean, you could have friends talking about plans on Facebook and they didn't mean to exclude you and had you reach out to them and said, oh, hey, can I meet you guys there? They would say, yeah, yeah, meet us there. So it's really about the perception.
Right, and so how does this relate then to problematic smartphone and social media use?
So FOMO is a variable that's highly related statistically to problematic social media use, problematic smartphone use. And so it would be, and it's also, we could conceptualize it as one of these risk factors. And so one of the risk factors in some of the theoretical models, like the IPACE model, are internet-related cognitive biases, which could be related to things like internet use expectancies, which is also a risk factor.
The misperception that using the internet can help you solve your problems, that it can help you relieve distress. It's possible it can, but some people overestimate the extent to which going online will relieve their negative emotion. So FOMO is similar in the way that it is also an internet-related cognitive bias, because people who are really high in FOMO feel like they're really missing out on everything.
So they're constantly checking, seeking assurance, checking their text messages, are people, are my friends, are my family, like what are they doing? Are they involving me? Things like that, and so that's another one of these risk factors.
And it's also kind of related, the way I'm describing it even right now is it seems to also be a bit related to excessive reassurance seeking, which is another construct. It's related to depression. And you can imagine how I'm describing these two, people who just feel like they are always needing reassurance, that they're worthy, that people are, including them in plans and things like that, that's, we call that excessive reassurance seeking behavior.
And so this is, so these are like traits that folks have. And so in the online digital space, that would be one place that these traits are manifesting. So it's not, I don't know, digital FOMO, it's just more trait FOMO that leads to then this digital behavior.
Right. I mean, FOMO, a lot of the FOMO items on FOMO scales that are widely used are really about the digital context, but it doesn't have to be, it's not exclusively digital.
And also it's not necessary, these are, I like how you said, these are kind of traits, these are psychological traits. There has also been work on FOMO in particular, distinguishing between trait FOMO and state FOMO. So that's another issue that there can be kind of state dependent FOMO, like based on a certain thing that you're going through in your life, you might be more seeking out reassurance and inclusion and things like that.
So there are trait aspects and also state dependent aspects too.
Right. So there could be, I'm a teenager and I just, my family just moved. And so I have this heightened sense of FOMO, but once I get adapted and whatever, then that'll sort of go back down to my baseline, my normal trait level FOMO.
Right.
So what you talked about them as cognitive biases, what makes it a cognitive bias?
So what makes it a cognitive bias is how you think about these things. Cognitive biases are typically misperceptions or thinking errors that we make. And so in the case of FOMO or excessive reassurance seeking, you know, it may be a cognitive bias because you feel, kind of back to the issue of the perception and the misperception, that you're missing out on important stuff, when maybe you're not missing out on important stuff.
And also kind of this idea of being socially excluded, you might mistakenly think that there's kind of intent on excluding you. When it's not intent, it's just that a lot of your friends may not reach out to every single one of their friends to invite them somewhere, but they certainly welcome you to join them if you reach out to them. So these are cognitive errors.
And so we and other groups have conceptualized FOMO as an internet-related cognitive error, because it might lead you to it. You have this misperception, and it would then lead you to engage in some maladaptive behavior, because oftentimes cognitive biases trigger maladaptive behaviors as a result, which is why oftentimes in clinical psychology, we treat cognitive errors and cognitive biases, and when we treat them, then the behaviors change as a result.
So I was thinking about in the social support literature that when folks look at perceptions of social support versus actual social support, there's not that strong of a correlation there. I was just wondering about that.
I'm imagining experiments where social rejection type of experiments, and you could measure FOMO, but I don't know if they've been done yet.
I was just kind of curious about that. So when people are experiencing FOMO conceptually, then they're hopping online to check to see, am I being excluded from things? Is that kind of the idea?
Partly, I think so. I think the way the process often works is that you're checking online a lot, not necessarily expecting the worst, but you're checking on online stuff a lot to see what am I missing out on? And if I'm missing out on something, I need to be a part of it.
Whether it's the news, global news, whether it's news among your friends, it also gets tricky because there's no real way to stay on top of all this because algorithms feed us what they think we want to see. So you can't catch up on everything because we're kind of at the whim of the algorithms of the social media companies.
So is that exacerbating? Obviously, the algorithms are designed, as far as I understand, the algorithms are primarily designed to keep you engaged, right? So if you're on Twitter or Facebook, to keep you on Twitter or Facebook.
So I think that's like, we know that they are effective, the effectiveness varies and all that sort of stuff. But do they... So almost by definition, if they're effective, they would increase problematic smartphone and social media use, because they're keeping you doing that instead of other things in your life.
Do they... Does that increase FOMO or other sort of... Yeah, I guess...
Yeah, what do we see there?
I suppose it could, because the algorithms... I mean, I think that if you really feel like you want to be on top of everything that your family and friends are doing, and you're not going to be shown everything because of the algorithms showing you what they think you want to see, and you want to just see it all, but it's not going to show all of it to you. So there's always going to be something that you missed out on that you're going to just hear about at the water cooler.
Oh, did you hear about that? No, I didn't see that in my Twitter feed. How did I miss that?
Oh, well, it's the algorithms. And so then at the water cooler, you're feeling the FOMO, like, oh, I wish I had known about this last week when the party was happening, and now it's too late and I missed the party. What would have happened at the party that I missed that I wish that I would have been involved with, you know?
Yeah, so okay. So two things that you said a few minutes ago. So one, you talked about coping, like in terms of what leads people to this problematic use.
One, you talked about coping, so that makes me think about avoidance automatically. So I want, we'll always start there, and then I'll get to rumination. So go for it.
Coping is involved as a potential risk factor for problematic smartphone use, problem with social media, that sort of thing. Partly it's related to the person type of variables, like psychopathology, that could drive what your coping is. Are you engaging in adaptive versions of coping or maladaptive avoidant type of coping?
But these things then can also drive excessive internet use. And so, for example, if you have someone who's socially anxious and they engage in maladaptive coping, how do they still function in life? Maybe they avoid going to class, in-person class, as much as possible.
As a college professor, I'm sure you might see this. There are just some students who just never show up to class. And maybe it's because, in some cases, it might be about social anxiety.
And if you had a remote class, maybe they would show up because, maybe they would still not show up. Some people are socially anxious enough that they're not interested in, they want to avoid all interactions as much as possible. But generally speaking, I think it's commonly accepted that socially anxious, it's probably, if they had to show up for something, it's probably gonna be more palatable for them to show up online rather than in person.
So we have this coping, and how is the socially anxious person, what are their coping processes? And it might, and it's so, in their case, it might be avoidance. And then therefore, the socially anxious person might engage with a lot of technology and media as kind of a compensation for not being able to engage socially in person.
So this is also related to the social compensation hypothesis. So some people might use digital and overuse digital technology because it's a compensation for them preferring that instead of doing in-person interaction in everyday life.
Yeah, I think about this sometimes with podcasts so that like when I listen to a podcast, that it's this interesting experience, particularly with shows that you listen to a lot, you sort of develop these relationships with these people, even though they don't know you. And so I think about like, does this feel some sort of a social need or desire, but I don't have any, the person who's listening doesn't have like, you don't want to put out any effort. So it's like a, you know, there's no fear of rejection.
And you just can sort of like turn on and be a part of this group or whatever it is. And does that sort of, I don't know, quell that desire a little bit so that one is less likely to pursue it in real life?
Yeah, and of course, I think maybe an elephant in the room is that we just went through the COVID pandemic and for a lot of people, they had to stay at home for a long time. I mean, there were semesters where I was teaching online only and I wasn't in the classroom at all. And you've got college students who a good portion of their college was not being in person and doing this kind of easy online interaction.
And then I wonder what you're talking, also what you're raising, Dan, is like, is there a difference between getting to know the professor online as opposed to in person? In person, you know, the professor, usually you might have kind of, you check in with students after class and you get to know them a little bit. Like you're talking about a podcast host and you get to know the podcast host or the guest or something like that.
But when we have online classes, that's probably a different type of experience.
Yeah, no, I absolutely think. And I think that one of the things that, at least as far as I can tell with remote work, whether it's in university or it's in other contexts is that there's just so much less of that water cooler talk that the person you sit next to in class, you just sort of have a, just a real quick conversation about whatever, or you say, hey, what did she say? And just all those small interactions that don't happen when you're online because you need to, if we have a department meeting and you and I and 15 other people or 20 other people or 30 other people are in the department meeting, that if I want to say something to you real fast after the meeting, I'm probably not because I would have to email you or message you to set up a Zoom meeting, and I'm not going to do it for just this thing that's going to take 75 seconds for me to communicate.
And this is all, it's a double edged sword. I mean, there might be times or reasons when it's helpful. Like there have been times during this semester when I didn't have access to my car because it was in the shop.
And so I was able to easily do a WebEx or Zoom video call teaching lesson. So, you know, there can be good or bad that comes from this.
Yeah, and I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, one of the places that I see that is with snow days that, you know, like university, particularly in Canada, they're hesitant to close the university. But as the instructor, you might say, all right, the university isn't closed, class is still on, but I see the roads, and I don't feel like this is the safest.
So I can do this online, have everybody stay in their safe place. You know, there'll be that many less car accidents and just the anxiety and all that. So I think that that is, you know, it's a boon.
It's wonderful that we have access to this now.
And there's also kind of a cost benefit and like incremental costs in terms of like, I know that in the US, a lot of PhD programs in psychology, we've moved to remote interviews for graduate students for admission. And that's saving the graduate students, prospective graduate students a ton of money in interviewing hotels and flight travel. And so, yeah, so the downs, there is the cost of, they're not seeing the university in person at that moment.
Although once they select the university that they, that, you know, once they get an offer and they decide, oh, I want to come here, they could, then they could make one trip and go to that place and take a quick look instead of interviewing at 10 places, $2,000 times each trip, you know. So, so there's a cost benefit issue.
Yeah, I think it's a great point. And particularly it allows people who can't afford to do those things, right? It potentially opens the door more for folks who can afford to go interview at all of these places that now that they can apply outside of their region, because they know they can interview, if they get in, yeah.
Including in other countries. So it's kind of like an equalizer. And so, you know, we sometimes in our program, we get applications from prospective students in other countries.
Yeah, okay. So did you have any thoughts about rumination and how that relates to problematic use?
Yeah, so we've studied that in several of our studies. Rumination is kind of a type of repetitive negative thinking. We've also studied worry, which is another type of repetitive negative thinking.
And we found that it's really correlated with problematic social media use and also problematic smartphone use. I think that what's happening is that people who ruminate, it's quite possible that they might be ruminating about social issues, boyfriends, girlfriends, family members, things like that. And so it's connected with excessive smartphone use and social media use because in order to satisfy their negative emotion related to rumination, they go and check.
So if you worry, are my friends thinking about me? Or it's also related to, we've also studied and found that it's related to excessive reassurance seeking. So we found a pathway where that if you're ruminating and you're engaging in this excessive reassurance seeking, what do you do about that?
You're constantly checking your phone in order to feel assured. You're constantly checking your social media to make sure that your friends and family have liked your posts, commented on your posts and things like that. It's also, we talked about FOMO, it's all connected to that.
So these are all risk factors for this problematic use of technology.
So just could you give a snapshot definition of reassurance seeking?
Yeah, so the reassurance seeking, the excessive reassurance seeking, this is a construct that goes back to decades ago with regard to being involved in major depressive disorder. So folks who are really depressed have a major depressive disorder. There's been a ton of research over the years suggesting that part of their depression is this constant need to reach out to people close to them to get reassurance that they're still worthy and valuable.
And so in the old days before smartphones, this could, I mean, this could have meant, calling on a landline or something like that. But nowadays, what we've written about in our studies is that that could very well translate to trying to gain, trying to excessively gain reassurance through text messaging, social media, that sort of thing. And it can be excessive because if you're checking in with your family a little bit once in a while, oh, hey, don't forget about me.
Like, are you guys up to anything? That, you know, having a meal, you know, can I join you? If it's too much, like what often happens with severe depressed patients where, you know, they want to engage socially, but they have this driving away effect where they're so depressed and or they're perceived as needy, reassurance-seeking, that the folks in their lives kind of want to back off.
They're like, oh my God, this person's so needy. So it has this unintended opposite effect.
Right. I think that that's, I sort of want to go down this road, but maybe, well, I just sort of, because I think this is such an important thing for folks to understand that this is one of the, I don't know, one of the hells of often experienced by folks who are depressed, which is that they have this strong need, desire to feel loved and cared for and attended to, but the very nature of that need and desire and how annoying it can be to other people in their life actually pushes people away. So you're saying that I think it's sort of the thing that you're trying to do to cope is actually making the challenge you're experiencing that you're trying to cope with even worse.
Yeah, exactly. It's kind of this push-pull, and it's almost like the depressed person just needs to kind of regulate how much they're reaching out so that it's not perceived as, oh my god, I don't want to be around this person. The other person thinks about the depressed person, I don't want to be around this person because they're just overdoing it.
So yeah.
So what's our sense of, for folks who have problematic smartphone or social media use, what's our sense of when they are online for a while, how that impacts them affectively, emotionally?
Yeah, so that's, I think that this is maybe a good time to talk about the chicken and egg effect of problematic smartphone use and psychopathology. And so I think your question really kind of, in terms of like, what are the effects of, of smartphone, social media use, prolonged use, negative effects, that's kind of a societal question that we're dealing with. We're hearing about this in the news all the time.
You know, as we're recording this, I believe the Senate and the House just passed a bill banning TikTok from the app stores, and that in the US. And that is partly based on the data issue of their data being kept on Chinese servers as opposed to in Western servers like in the US. But it's also partly about the negative mood effects that have been alleged that TikTok causes teenagers to have.
As well as other social networks, you might have seen the big tech companies recently testifying to Congress about this. So it's an interesting issue because the question is presumed to be what kind of negative mental health issues are caused by excessive use of the phone and social media. But actually, we already talked about risk factors for technology addictions, and the way that I portrayed that was the other way around.
And so in fact, most of the experts in this field, including me, actually believe that it's probably psychopathology that's a big driver of excessive internet use rather than excessive internet use causing psychopathology. And that's because we have decades of research in psychiatry and clinical psychology fields where we know what the risk factors for mental disorders are. It's things like genetics, chemical imbalances, parental rearing practices.
I mean, you've got decades of trauma, things like that. So we know what causes mental disorders, and it doesn't seem like over the years that a major contender of a risk factor for mental disorders has ever been things like new use of technology, whether we go back to when the landline telephone was first created, television, other technology types. So we know what causes mental disorders, and so probably it's not technology use or even excessive use that causes the onset of mental disorders, but it's rather probably what we think is that if you have a mental disorder, then it's so easy for you to use the internet or technology because you probably have a smartphone in your pocket, and you're gonna go to that in order to try to find some emotional relief.
That's gonna be easier than engaging in other maladaptive mechanisms. Like before the smartphone, maybe you'd go to use drugs or alcohol, and still that might happen, but it's easier to just pick up the phone in your pocket. Now, that's not to say that using the smartphone or social media can't trigger negative emotion.
So here's what I think is that probably it's that mental disorder is what drives some people to excessively use their phone or social media. Using your phone excessively or social media can induce negative mood states. It probably doesn't cause the first time disorder, unless you're talking about a patient who they have a vulnerability to that.
They have a genetic predisposition to psychopathology or something like that. And it's not like 100% of researchers agree with me, but some of the issues are that so many of the studies are cross-sectional, so we can't really tease this apart empirically because we don't have as many longitudinal studies to look at what causes what. And even the studies that do look at this longitudinally, longitudinally, they're not usually measuring, well, did the person have a mental disorder at time one before they started using social media or smartphone?
And they're usually not measuring disorders at subsequent time points, but rather just negative mood states. But I've already said, I totally agree that using a smartphone, using social media, you can get cyber bullied, you can have other negative experiences on social media that will induce a negative mood state.
So it sounds like what you're saying is some sort of, yeah, whether it's a psychiatric disorder, some sort of mental health challenge is what's gonna lead one into problematic smartphone or social media use.
Then would it make sense that because I can, so if I'm avoidant, right? So if I'm trying to, if I'm avoidant of whatever distress and the potential causes of it, that because I can jump online or jump on my phone to be avoidant, because it's so easy for me to be avoidant, now we're talking very conceptually here, that could that make that avoidant behavior and then sort of the disorder that's associated with it, could that either sort of potentiate and make worse that mental health difficulty and then potentially also keep me from engaging in the behaviors that could potentially reduce that disorder or that distress?
Yeah, and so with regard to that, I should probably clarify. So using social media, smartphone use can induce negative mood states. But for people who had a disorder to begin with beforehand, I think it could certainly exacerbate their mood problems.
It could exacerbate their disorder. It's just that I don't think that it would cause disorder in the first place. And so then you have kind of these reciprocal effects where you've got someone who may be major depression disordered patient, who has increased, after developing major depressive disorder, they've increased their use of their phone, possibly to try to reduce some of their negative emotion, and then it makes their depression worse.
Because if they weren't using their smartphone, but rather so much, but rather they're engaging in a more adaptive, a less maladaptive type of coping skill, like behavioral scheduling, seeing people, seeing their friends, then their condition could be improved rather than worsened.
Right, so okay, so what you're, so try to paraphrase the idea here would be you don't have the person who's going along, everything's great, or you know, they're average or sort of above average in terms of their mental health, and then they get sucked into their phone, or and then they get depressed. Like you're saying that's the not, that's a, if that were to happen, that would be very uncommon. That's not how this typically looks, that instead it's somebody who's sort of predisposed to, who has some of this depression, for example, who then would get into problematic smartphone use, social media use, and then sort of, that could potentiate it or.
I mean, of course we know that everyone gets depressed at some point in their life. So they could get depressed in terms of having a negative mood for a while. But in terms of like a full blown diagnostic disorder, like a major depressive disorder, I think that that's unlikely.
Again, not everybody agrees with me, but I think the general consensus is like, it just doesn't seem plausible that a piece of technology would cause first time disorder without any vulnerability to that. And I think part of the... So this also flies in the face of what's being talked about in society right now.
In society, people are talking about the negative effects of social media. Sure, there can be negative effects, but they seem to be thinking... What you hear about in the news is social media is causing people to commit suicide.
It's causing major depressive anxiety disorders. I think it's more likely that it's exacerbating that in people who are already vulnerable. And I think, so why are we having this?
I think people are confusing cause and effect. It seems so much easier to think, oh, social media, depression, oh, where's the culprit? The culprit is the social media.
Because as you know, like we've got decades of psychology about placing blame. And it makes us feel better as a society if we know where to place blame in things. Oh, why did this person die?
Oh, well, it was because they smoked 10 packs a day. That must be the reason. Okay, maybe that is the reason.
So we're always trying to find this, I think this is relates to the just world hypothesis. This isn't my area of research, but we're trying to attribute things. And so I think that's what might be going on here with us trying to place blame on social media for all of these things that are happening.
When I don't think social media causes suicide, I don't think it causes first-time disorder, that sort of thing.
Right, so what I'm hearing you say, to try to summarize it a little bit, is that you're not saying that social media can't be quite problematic for folks. That there can't, that I hear you saying it can be very problematic for folks, and that it can take folks who are struggling and not help them in some cases. And so this is something to be taken seriously.
At the same time, it's not, when we think about cause and effect, you're making the argument that this is not the sole and true cause of anyone's depression. And when we're talking, when I'm saying depression, I mean like clinical depression, not just feeling down.
And it might be that it might, we might have like kind of a who cares argument in terms of like, to someone who's really depressed, but who doesn't meet, is not so depressed that they meet the full blown disorder criteria for the disorder of major depression. You know, I've already said that I don't think that social media causes a depressive disorder, but it can cause a negative mood state. It can cause some depressed mood.
To the person who's suffering, they probably don't care. Oh, well, what's the cause? What's the effect?
Like it's still bad for them. So if for them, social media is causing a depressive mood state, that is still a bad thing. But we also have to not overlook when we're talking about the double-edged sword of, like for some people, social media, using their smartphone, is causing great good for them.
And so there's kind of this, some folks like me and others have written about the rich get richer, poor get poorer effect with regard to internet use. And so some people, it's poor, the rich get richer, people who have good social relationships, they can use social media to their advantage, to boost the social capital in ways that social media, they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. But for a depressed person who tries to use social media and stumbles in terms of they get shut down by their friends or they're just doom scrolling or something like that, then that's kind of the poor gets poorer kind of issue.
But I think part of what's going on here is, so why is it that we're attributing all of the negatives to social media? It could be this world, just world hypothesis thing. It could also be just that over the course of history, whenever a new technology has been launched that really changes society, so much of society, especially older people in society, automatically draw the conclusion that there's gotta be a negative to it.
Television, you know, I was born in the early 70s, television had already been around. But still growing up, I was told don't sit in front of the TV too long, it's gonna hurt your eyesight, you're not gonna make any friends if you're just sitting in front of the TV. When it turns out I went to school in person, I was making friends, my eyesight is actually not so good, but it wasn't because of watching TV probably.
And, you know, I don't know if you know the story, but even Aristotle in ancient Greek times lamented about the fact that people were starting to use pencils to remember things on paper. And he thought, you know, our brains would atrophy because we have to... And today, like, who would make such an argument that, like, it's bad to carry a pencil or pen around with them?
So just over the time, I think we just have to be careful about distrusting new technologies too much.
Can we jump into just a little bit the... So the gender or sex difference kind of stuff here. And I don't know if I should be using the word.
I think I should probably be using the word sex, but I'm not sure.
We might also, after that, want to talk about measures and assessments for problematic smartphone use because we talked about it in the first take, but seven really talked about it this time.
So how about this? Let's hold, let's hit... Can we hit that when we talk about suggestions for clinicians?
Yeah.
Then we can just... That would be perfect. But thank you.
Yeah, I'll make a note of that.
It's a little hard at times to keep track of. What did we talk about during the first take?
I'm kind of thinking the same thing. So my general understanding of it is that particularly with youth, and I know that you do most of your work on adults, I would say, you know, 18-plus, that problematic social media or smartphone use for boys tends to be more video game kind of stuff and for girls tends to be more social media kind of stuff. Is my understanding of that correct?
Do you have any sense of that?
So, I mean, first of all, there have been some meta-analyses done with things like problematic social media use, problematic smartphone use, and kind of across the literature, you do find a gender sex effect overall. Women, girls use their phones and social media more so than men and boys. And there are some differences with reference to particular types of features and social network sites and things like that.
Off the top of my head, I'm not an expert on this, so I don't know what the exact gender effects are. Of course, there's also an age effect, right? Younger people are using technology more so than older people, but there also you're going to see differences, right?
Like younger people don't really use Facebook these days. Older people like me do. Younger people are using Snapchat and other things like that.
But these gender effects, and also even the age effects, don't pan out in every case. In my research, when we're looking at risk factors for problematic types of internet use, we typically control for age and gender, and sometimes we find that when we control for them that there is a statistical relationship with the type of problematic internet use, and sometimes we find that there is no significant relationship. So maybe across the literature, there's a weak, significant relationship, and because it's a weak relationship, it doesn't translate to findings across all the studies.
Okay. So there's not a huge takeaway there based on your work.
Right. And I think it also relates to a similar issue in terms of risk factors is we talked about the distinction between the long-term risk factors, the personal personality, personal characteristics versus the more proximal. And something that I've found that I've written in a couple of my papers about to try to explain our results is that it seems to be that it's the more proximal indicators that are more robustly related to problematic internet use, which makes sense because long-standing things are kind of diffuse.
If you're asking someone about something that happened to them in childhood, that may not have as much of a close connection to how they're feeling right now. Whereas the more proximal recent things like how are they coping, how's their emotion dysregulation, and FOMO, things like that, those tend to be the effect sizes tend to be stronger and more robust in predicting problematic types of internet use.
So there's trait characteristics.
The traits seem to be less powerful than the emotional process, the more recent emotional processes, coping, current cognitions, things like that.
So I'm thinking about, thinking about this, I thought about sort of three types of people who might be listening to this. So one, you have just the regular person who's listening to this who's saying, you know, I, yeah, I maybe don't have, you know, a clinical, if you will, problem. And maybe some folks do feel like, who are listening to this do feel like they do.
But I, you know, I see some flares of this in my own life. You know, what types of suggestions would you have? So there's that type of a person who might be listening to this.
There's the clinician or train or clinical trainee who might be listening to this, who'd be thinking about, yeah, I see this a lot in my practice, or I want to prepare for it. What are some thoughts in terms of assessment and intervention? And I think about the third person, and maybe I'm just projecting here, but the parent or soon to be parent or whatever who is listening to this and is like, oh my God, I'm so freaked out about my kid and whatever.
What thoughts do you have? So I'm wondering if you'd be willing to sort of talk to those, take a couple of minutes for each one of those three in whatever order and however you would want, and I'll sort of hit one of them, and then I'll follow up with some questions.
Yeah. So maybe we can start with a clinician or I guess the researcher. So assessments, yes, it's helpful if we assess the frequent, let's say we're talking about, for example, assessing for problematic smartphone use.
It's helpful for us to know how much is the person using their smartphone every day and also what are they doing on their smartphone. And certainly you can ask about that with self-report, and that's kind of a typical way that we do that. So there's self-report psychological scales like the smartphone addiction scale.
There is a variety of different scales that ask about how often people use different features of their smartphone. I usually use a scale that we developed in my lab years ago, the smartphone use frequency scale. But again, these are all self-report.
And the distinction would be that asking about smartphone use frequency is more about how often are you using different features of your smartphone. Whereas the smartphone addiction scale, and I know we talked about the addiction terminology, that is what the scale is called, even though we typically refer to it as problematic smartphone use. The smartphone addiction scale is asking the questions regarding to what extent is your use of your smartphone causing you these everyday problems.
So it's asking questions about social impairment, academic impairment if you're in school, work impairment, and that sort of thing. But again, these are all self-report measures. So in some of our work in our lab, we've used things like the iPhone, the iOS screen time feature so that we can look to see objectively what are people really doing on their phone and how much time are they really spending on their phone.
Because people are not very good estimators, so to speak. They're not very accurate when estimating how much time they spend on their phone or how much time they spend doing certain things on your phone. I mean, you know, Dan, probably, you might go up to your office, to your computer, and tell your friend, I'm just going to go and check my email for a couple minutes.
And you go there and you come down and they say, I thought you were going to be a couple minutes. That ended up being an hour and 15 minutes. So we're not good at estimating these sorts of things.
So objectives can definitely help. And that's also related to the more recent field of digital phenotyping, which is about ways that we can objectively understand people's digital traces without just asking them about it, in which case they might either not tell us the truth purposefully or not purposefully, but we can get digital traces of behavior.
So in talking to the clinician, so they talked about the assessment piece, so how do you think about integrating these sort of problematic uses into clinical work?
Yeah, so I think assessment is the first step. Just like if you go to the mechanic and they say, like, has so often happened to me, my air or something like my air conditioning is not working, and then you get to the mechanic and your air conditioning is working. So they want to know from you an assessment, like what time of day does it not work?
What are you doing? Were you running the AC for a while first and then it stopped working? They want to do a good mechanic is kind of like a good therapist or a good psychological evaluator, because they want to get to the bottom of what's the problem, when does the problem seem to happen, what are the circumstances and conditions under which the problem is manifesting or not.
And so that's where it's quite helpful. Of course, if you go to a psychologist, typically you would get a broad, hopefully you get a broadband psychological assessment of, you know, anxiety disorders, depression disorder, all sorts of things. But if you're coming specifically because of a digital technology issue, then it's helpful to get a real fine-tuned sense of what's exactly going on with this issue.
Great. And then once you have that information, then you'd be able to integrate that into whatever therapeutic approach that you're using.
Yeah. And so with regard to the therapeutic approaches, there are existing treatment protocols for excessive internet use, a bit more so on general internet, general excessive internet use, rather than like specific types like problematic social media or problematic smartphone.
And so there are psychological interventions and there are also technological interventions. The psychological interventions are important because I'd already mentioned that some of the risk factors are psychopathology. So if a person who's depressed is using their smartphone too much because they're trying to alleviate negative emotion, if we instead find more adaptive ways of alleviating negative emotion, then they're probably not going to need to use their smartphone so much.
So in clinical psychology, we often use cognitive behavioral therapy, we use behavioral techniques to increase behavioral scheduling, we use cognitive techniques to challenge maladaptive thoughts. We've talked about cognitive biases and maladaptive thoughts. So helping the psychological precursors will be one big area to help the digital overuse.
But there are also technological interventions that we can use that are also talked about in the literature. So you can do things to make it more difficult for the person to excessively engage in technology. So some of the things that are talked about are including that have empirical support is you can make your smartphone not have any color, which just makes it way less fun to use.
If it's just everything is gray scale, it really is not a pleasant experience.
You're talking about the screen.
Yeah, exactly. It's like watching black and white TV instead of color TV. It's just, you know, maybe some people don't mind watching black and white movies, but I've never really been a big fan of that.
I didn't even know that you could do that on a phone.
Yeah, deep in the settings, you can do that. You can also do things that have been reported in the literature, like make it harder for people to access some of their accounts. If you delete certain apps from their phones, so that they would have, if they wanted to use the, let's say that, you know, a person is someone, a particular person just naturally gravitates to Twitter.
And if when they use Twitter, they overdo it and they're just on it a lot. Well, if you log them out and make it a little bit harder for them to access Twitter, they'd have to like go find their password somewhere and log in. You're just doing some things to create a little bit of friction in order to make it more difficult for them to use it.
And sometimes they'll just not use it because the friction is too much.
Yeah, and I've heard of like, so for Twitter to delete the app from your phone, but you would still be able to use it from your computer. Just the idea of it's not in your pocket all the time. I guess that would also sort of fit into this.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of related to, it's kind of not too far off from behavioral scheduling. Like, you know, with certain kinds of psychological issues is like, okay, well, I'm not going to, you know, one of the things that we might tell someone who worries too much is we're going to give you carte blanche to worry for one hour a day. And for that one hour, just do nothing but worry.
But for the rest of the day, do other stuff. And if you feel like you're about to worry, say, no, no, I'm going to wait until that hour. So it's kind of like this.
Okay, well, you're not going to use Twitter all day. You're out and about on your phone. You have your phone on you, but we're going to reserve your Twitter use to when you're in your home at the computer.
And you're just not at home as much as you are out and about, if that's the case for someone. So that's kind of how that would work.
I know that there's a movement for people sort of going back to flip phones. And I'm always like, I'm fascinated, fascinated by it. And you know, it does, I sort of...
If you can find a flip phone.
But just the idea of it, you know, and there's all these reasons sort of why not to do it. But, you know, there's... It's an interesting idea, you know, and we survived for a long time with no phones, but certainly with flip phones.
So, yeah, but there is... I think that we have sort of moved towards this societal expectation that folks do have a smartphone in their pocket. So it's just sort of the expectation.
Yeah.
And of course, that also means that you're always accountable. Everybody knows that if they need to reach you, they can always reach you on your smartphone. And then that leads to some social friction sometimes, of like, you know, you sent a message to a family member and a day goes by and you haven't heard from them.
And then all of a sudden you're like, are you okay? You know, did you die? Like what happened when in the old days, it's like if you didn't hear from someone for a day, it's like that's just kind of a normal part of life.
Yeah, absolutely. So also related to that is always being available by email on your phone. And so this also kind of relates to how people get work done efficiently.
And so without, you know, kind of setting aside psychopathology and things like that, I think we all we live in a society now where we want to be efficient with getting our work done. And yet sometimes it feels like my job is just checking email and responding to email and like that shouldn't be part of my job. I'm not like I have a job to do that's beyond just replying to emails and reading emails.
And I think we all it's going to be helpful for us to find ways to efficiently deal with this and whether it's only checking your email certain times of the day. Because if you're always checking your email and every time you hear a little alert about your email that you leave what you're doing when you might be kind of in a flow state and doing well and getting things done, you leave that, get distracted by your email or a text message, and you handle that and then you go back and you don't immediately continue from where you left off. You have to think like, wait, what was I doing?
Where do I? So there are these switching costs that happen from getting interrupted by digital media. And so I think regardless of psychopathology, we can all try to do things to help us get things done better and be more efficient about our work in school, whether it's going in do not disturb mode, choosing how we respond to email and text messages, and there's the notion of batching.
Well, you can even do this with your iPhone and I think Android. You can make it so that you get a batch of messages delivered at certain points of the day instead of them coming in on a rolling basis. So I think it's always helpful to think what interferes with my ability to get work because I get interrupted, and how can I overcome that?
And there are probably some easy ways to do that.
Yeah, I know that's one thing that I've changed over the years is typically I only check my email once a day. And just because I've just found that I would just days and days would go by and I wouldn't get anything done. And it's just now obviously this depends a lot on what your profession is.
Or because for some folks, responding to email kind of is their job. But I would say that's not the majority of folks.
So like an administrative assistant or something like that, they're handling phone call, a reception. I guess we used to call them receptionists. Now I guess they're like an administrative assistant.
But also if you're checking more than once a day, that's kind of what I was also talking about a moment ago about having this expectation. If someone emails you at 10 at night and you respond right away, now they've learned your work schedule. They know that if they need to reach you, they're going to reach you at 10 at night.
So maybe don't check at night. Or if you want to check at night, fine, check your email at 10 p.m. But maybe don't reply at 10 p.m.
Either reply the next morning or a lot of email programs now let you schedule send so that the email goes out the next morning so that the people you're talking to get to know that, oh, you're checking messages and replying from 9 to 5 or something like that. And that's going to help you get your work done. And hope maybe it'll help also them get their work done because I don't know why they need to be sending you a message at 10 at night their time, 10 at night your time, that sort of thing.
So for the parents, if you're just sort of communicating to the parents, what are some thoughts?
Yeah, so for the parents, I mean, this issue comes up a lot about the child using, first of all, how old should my kid be when I get them a phone?
You know, I think we probably want kids, especially young kids, to play with the friends, go outside, do things, maybe even if it's winter, and they're not expected to go outside for a long period of time, like they can do other things in their house that don't require them to get constant reinforcement only from using some sort of device. So I don't think it's bad to let kids have access, I mean, probably under a couple years old, you don't want them to be using devices much, but for school-aged kids, you know, it's okay for them, it's probably okay for them to use devices, but you probably want to help instill in them some sort of restrictions.
Like they shouldn't think that I can just be on my iPad all day long, every day. There's no school today, so I'm just going to be on my iPad all day long. It would be great, I mean, at younger ages, it probably would be helpful to take the device away from them to have some sort of schedule.
But then that just teaches kids to just, they can use the device whenever they want, as long as their parent says it's okay. So ideally, what's great is to convince kids that there are other things worth doing than using screens, so that they want to use, so that they think themselves, they internalize like, okay, I've been using this device for a long time, maybe I should switch and do something different now.
So as a parent, how would I start to know if my kids' digital use is getting to be too much?
I think one way would be to see what happens when you suggest to them that they go do something else. You know, hey, it's time for dinner, how about if we put the iPad away, the phone away, something like that. And if, I mean, if they're putting up a huge fight, you know, then that could be an indication that, okay, there's something wrong here.
I mean, that is also normal for kids to just put up a huge fight when you take away anything from them. But what I'm saying is that when that happens, I think then you want to, then that's going to tell you, well, maybe you should be a little bit aggressive about having a plan of, okay, you can use it for this amount of time a day. You can, you know, and also, I don't know if you've ever heard of interviews with all of the tech giants.
They just don't let their kids use screens at all. It's like so funny, you know, you hear interviews with these tech CEOs and like, oh yeah, we never let our kids use social media or anything like that. But again, it's about the double edged sword issue.
You know, you can't, it's like there's this black and white thing of, oh no, you can only use your screen. Like I remember during the pandemic, I would tell my daughter, okay, well, let's get off your phone for a while. Let's get off YouTube on your computer for a while.
Let's like give your computer a break. Okay. And then like two hours later, oh, I have to do homework on my computer now.
Okay. So, you know, it's also helpful for kids to learn that there are certain things that are good to use computer technology for, but other things, maybe not so much. So, like, I know, for example, my daughter, she's 15 years old, you know, it's helpful for her to have social media, and it helps her to get in touch with her friends and do all these things.
But also, you know, we've always tried to encourage her to, oh, but let's go outside, let's get some exercise, let's go meet your friends, let's go do this sort of thing. So having balance in your life is an important thing.
So I feel like, Jon, we hit a lot of stuff for kind of the average listener, because I know I was taking notes about things I could do. Is there anything else that you wanted to hit at this? Because then I wanted to sort of jump into your thoughts about, you know, is there a role for government here?
What are your thoughts about that? Is there anything that you wanted to hit before we jump to that?
So you said we talked about kind of healthy people. Were you suggesting maybe we should talk about what about someone who seems like they're having a problem with digital media overuse?
Yeah, it could be. So I was sort of thinking that, you know, parent, clinician, and then sort of the average person listening. And I kind of felt like when you were talking about, like we covered a lot of stuff for the healthy person.
I think there was a lot of stuff for the healthy person that's the same as the stuff for the not as healthy person. But I just wanted to see if there's anything else that you wanted to hit before we moved on.
I mean, I think we still mostly covered healthy and maybe slightly unhealthy. We didn't really cover like the people. There are people who like have serious problems with social media and smartphone use, whether it's cyber bullying, harassment, trolling, those sorts of things.
And even, I mean, you know, I've gotten calls sometimes from people who've sought me out as an expert asking, what do I do? Like, I can't go near social media or a smartphone at all, because if I do, it's kind of like, I can't just eat one Pringle, I'll eat the whole package. And so these are kind of the more seriously affected, where if they just get involved in any technology internet use, they just go overboard, and then they just won't come out from under it.
And so there I think that for those sorts of folks, which are probably in the way minority, first of all, general psychological treatment is going to be a good thing, because there's probably some of those risk factors there with that person.
Sometimes what I've heard from these folks who have called me is they just engage in abstinence of digital media. If you know you have a problem with Pringles, you just try to stay away from it as much as possible. But in our modern-day society, it's kind of hard to stay away from all digital media.
You're going to have to use a computer at some point. So I think psychological treatment is going to help to process cognitions and behaviors and things like that. And hopefully that will make it so that you can…
so that the person has some better coping skills and ways to regulate their emotion that they won't go overboard if they are accessing the internet.
And do you want to hit on cyberbullying?
I mean, that's not really an expertise of mine specifically. But I mean, that would be another one of the consequences, like being the victim of trolling, cyberbullying. I mean, we've certainly had cases of people who encouraged others to kill themselves.
We've seen news reports and lawsuits about that nature. So that would be especially an issue in kids, where you would hope that the parents would be able, the teachers would be able to intervene. Do the parents know what the kid is doing on the Internet?
I mean, that's going to be a problem. So I think it is going to be helpful for parents to just not let the kid be off in the room all the time, using social media and all this sort of thing. But rather, it would be helpful to kind of know what the kid is doing.
And hopefully the kid would be able to confide in the parent if they're being bullied online or something like that. But they may not feel comfortable. And of course, we also know about schools that kind of brush bullying under the carpet.
And there's that issue. But it kind of leads back. It's related to that issue of it's easy for a parent to just make the iPad or the phone or computer the babysitter.
Because we live, we're active, we work, we do stuff, and sometimes we need time to get our stuff done. But we have kids in the house. And so we just need to keep an eye on what the kids are doing to make sure that it's not maladaptive stuff that they're doing.
So this leads into what your thoughts are in terms of government role in this. We talked about government taking action on TikTok. We've also talked about how the folks or the tech leaders don't let their kids use a lot of their platforms, implying that they are addictive and they aren't helpful to some extent.
And so obviously, government does play a role in terms of keeping kids from engaging in unhealthy behavior. We have that when it comes to what movies kids can go see, obviously, purchasing of certain drugs and that sort of thing. So what are your thoughts about the role of government in this?
Yeah, so I think that it's important for governments to get involved. I mean, one stance that you hear sometimes is that the onus should be on the social media companies and the big data companies. But I don't think that they're going to really police themselves.
The big data companies, their business is to get you to be on their devices and their social media networks as much as possible to deliver, at least in the case of social media, as many ads as much as possible for them to make money and for you to be on their services as much as possible so that they can collect as much data from you as they can in order to make money by selling your data. So we can't really rely on them to fix the situation. And therefore, we need governments involved.
We need to make sure that there are age requirements that are adhered to with regard to having social media accounts. I think in the US, it's age of 13. But still then, do we have mechanisms in place to prevent kids from under 13 years old from having a social media account?
We don't really have good ways to do that. And some states in the US have tried to impose some restrictions to create some sort of way to make it so that their parent has to approve based on a certain age requirements. And then also things like smartphone bans in schools that's starting to happen in certain states and also in certain countries, which these are kids we're talking about.
And so we need to be more careful to make sure that we're protecting kids. In terms of adults, adults can make their own decisions, and that's a different story. The US is a free country, which is where I am, and so we can't really impose on adults things like, oh, you can't use your smartphone for a certain number of hours a day or something like that.
But kids are different. They're growing, they're developing, and we need to look after them. And so I think that needs to happen with government regulations.
Is there one or two things that, if you were in charge, and you could sort of wave the magic wand, is there something that you would say, like this is the one thing I think that would be most useful, most helpful?
So I think that I basically agree in principle with smartphone bans in school, especially for certain ages, especially for young kids. If we're talking about older high school students, that's a different story. I mean, generally speaking, they can't really use their phones in class, but making it that you have to leave and leave it in their lockers or something like that, that could be something that's pursued or leave it at home, especially for younger kids.
And then also things like.
Restricted access to social media for kids. We have the TikTok ban, or really they're trying to force the sale. It's really about a couple of things like we talked about.
One is the emotional effects of using social media, which is a concern expressed by the government. And then the other is the data issue. But also there's a free speech issue here.
We have free speech in the US so can we block an app or service from offering their services to people? That has definite free speech ramifications. It's a complex issue.
And the thing with the TikTok ban is that there seems to be concern in Congress about what TikTok is doing with your data. I don't trust Meta or Google or any of these companies with my data. Now, the difference is that they say, but this is a Chinese company.
But shouldn't we also be concerned about data and how our data are being used by other tech companies? Because it seems like Congress rarely talks about that, very possibly because these companies contribute large amounts of money in lobbying to Congress.
Yeah, it's kind of a brave new world in terms of figuring all this stuff out and figuring out where we need to go next. But I think it's great that people like yourself and others are really picking up the torch and sort of running with it in order to try to understand so that we can actually, by understanding better, we can be effective in terms of how we respond. I mean, things are changing very quickly.
Yeah, so I just think it's tremendously important that you and your colleagues, the work that you all are doing.
Appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Jon. We'll do a fake sign-off here, and then we'll do a real sign-off on the end. We'll spend a minute or two.
But it was great. I really appreciate it. I personally learned a lot.
And so that's, you know, it's always a marker for success. Thank you, Jon.
All right, thank you.
I want to express my deep appreciation to Dr. Jon Elhai for joining us today. It was a fantastic conversation, and I'm thrilled we could share it with you. If today's episode sparked your interest, why not share it with someone else who might enjoy it too?
We've got some truly remarkable guests coming up that I can't wait for you to meet. But until then...